Thursday, March 13, 2008

Justifying the Crusades, the Inquisition and Islamophobia

Note: updated 6:00 pm March 13, 08For more on these topics see links to previous posts-

In doing research on the Holocaust and especially on what occurred in the Balkans i.e. Croatia/ Serbia during World War II I came across this interesting video . In the video the claim is made that Arabs were brought into Coatia to help the Nazis and the Croatian collaborators mass murder the Jews and Gypsies and others. But there is something odd about the video in that it seems to make too much of the involvement of Arabs / Muslims in the Holocaust. I don't doubt the veracity of the piece .

The Grand Mufti & Hitler, and Palestinian Genocide of Jews

Here we have the Arab /Palestinian Islamic connection to the Holocaust in the Balkans. Therefore since some Muslims killed Jews and others in the Balkans what are we to conclude from this fact. Are we to conclude that Muslims have always hated Jews. This is not quite true since anti-Semitism as preached in Christian countries was for the most part unknown in the Islamic world until the 19th century. Is part of the rationale behind this video that even The Holocaust can now in part be blamed on the Arabs, Palestinians, and Muslims. The Muslims and their leader the Mufti are as reprehensible as anyone else who willingly took part in the slaughter of the Jews, Gypsies and others .But that these Muslims took part in these atrocities doe not necessarily mean that all Muslims would have agreed with their actions.So these Muslims are guilty of War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity and should have been punished for their crimes.

But there were many people and organizations who suffered few if any consequences for the part they played in The Holocaust such as the Catholic Church and other Christian Churches which took part in these atrocities all over Europe including the Balkans and Eastern Europe.

So forget about the fact that millions of Christians willingly took part in the Holocaust.

Forget about the 2,000 year hatred of the Jews preached by the Christian Churches and Christian Leaders.

Forget the fact that the Vatican didn't finally absolve Jews of the collective guilt of the Killing of Jesus until the 1960s.

Forget that the Vatican has not apologized unconditionally for its anti-Semitism and its silence during the Holocaust.

It is a matter of historical fact that in part,at least, it was the 2000 year long preachings against the Jews by the Christian Churches which laid the ground-work for Hitler's Final Solution.

Often one hears the remark that why didn't the Jews of Germany and Europe take more action to resist the Nazis. But given the history of European Jewry many of them saw this as just another outbreak of anti-Semitism and that no matter how bad it got it would soon pass. After centuries of having governments and Monarchs and Popes pass legislation restricting the rights of their Jewish citizens and banning them from the professions and other jobs and then locking them in the Ghettos at night and having undergone the Inquisition and such the European Jews had become accustomed to being oppressed and hated by Christians. But since the time of the Enlightenment and the rise of liberalism and notions like equality and Human Rights throughout most of Europe the Jews had been able to improve their lot and were almost convinced that the populace and the Church and those in power now accepted them and their religion.But the Conservative Christians hated liberalism in all its forms and to further discredit its growing appeal used the old hatred of the Jews to discredit it . These reactionaries claimed that liberalism and all reform movements were being used and manipulated by the Jews to undermine the legitimate authority of the Church and those in secular power including the Monarchs.

The Monarchy of the various nations from the Kings and Queens of England to Tsars of Russia owed their authority not to the people but to God and the Church whether Protestant, Church of England or the Roman Catholic Church or the Russian or Eastern Orthodox Church. Further to question the natural hierarchy or the basis of the class structure was seen as questioning the Church and God. God made the poor and rich and the Monarchs and each was supposed to know their place and just accept it . There are many now in our present age who still make such claims i.e. the Neoconservatives and the Religious Right and Evangelical Christians - if you are poor God made you that way and the Rich are being rewarded by God- or George Bush is president of the United States because God chose him as he did Tony Blair of England and Stephen Harper of Canada. So how then can any of us mere mortals criticize these chosen one's of God.

Anyway ,What we are supposed to believe is that Hitler and the Nazis invented anti-Semitism and so were not part of the long history of Christian ant-Semitism. In fact there are those who claim that anti-Semitism in European Christian countries was not really that serious of a problem. According to this view yes they will admit there were outbreaks of anti-Semitism but these were usually a matter of mob violence and had nothing to do with those in positions of authority whether the Church, or the Monarchs or Nobles or the governments of the time.

It 's like the torturous arguments Christians have developed claiming Hitler was never a Christian but was an Atheist or an Evil Pagan and that of all those who followed him only a few if any were Christians.

The thing of it is is that whatever becomes the prevalent view in our society or whatever is taught or promulgated by Western Civilization is to be taken as the truth .For instance if you visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum online there is very little about Anti-Semitism prior to the rise of the Nazis. The website also does not deal in any detail with the history of anti-semitism in the United States i.e. the Ku Klux Klan,Father Coughlin the popular radio preacher of the 1930s or with Henry Ford and his newspaper the Deerborn Press and how he helped to introduce the American Public with the vile Protocols of the Elders of Zion or Ford's personal connections with Hitler. Or what they suggest is that the Nazis form of anti-semitism is more virulent and hateful and is characterized as being a modern form of anti-semitism. As liberalism arose in the 19th century so did a more vicious form of anti-semitism. This assumption or theory is far from being conclusive.

In anti-liberal and anti-democratic societies such as Russia under the Tzar's tens of thousands of Jews were massacred in Pogroms which were instigated quite often by officials and the secret police acting on behalf of the Russian government. It was the Secret Police of Russia which created the notorious Fraud and Forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Russia of course claimed itself to be a Christian Nation. The Protocols blamed all of the problems of the time on the Jews. Marxism, Darwinism, liberalism , and those who were against the monarchy or who believed in and took seriously Thomas Pain's The Rights of Man were all being manipulated by the evil Jews. Those insisting on equal rights for women or who wanted to reform the labor laws or who defended the rights of Children were attempting to over-throw Christian morality .

The dominant narrative of the Holocaust arms Israel to the teeth, demonizes Palestinians and leaves Jews feeling abandoned, isolated and angry.

I'm in the living room of a family friend, a Jewish woman who emigrated from Poland. The subject changes from yoga to Israel-Palestine, and I tell her that I think America needs to change its foreign policy towards Israel. She says, "In what way, so that the Arabs will throw the Jews into the sea?" It takes four minutes of back and forth for the conversation to further degenerate. She finally says, "Look, what I have to say isn't pretty, but I'm not afraid. I'm going to say it anyways. The Palestinians are nothing but vermin. They make trouble in every country they live in. Even the other Arab countries don't want them."

I take a deep breath. I've heard this before, except with "Jews" instead of "Palestinians." Jews are vermin. They make trouble in every country they live in.

Compare this form of vicious racist critique of Islam to Anti-Semitism

Christians for centuries believed it was their duty to oppress or kill all heretics, witches, pagans and other non-Christians from Muslims to Jews to Native Americans to the people of India or South Africa to Asia

Definition of Jihad:What is Jihad: The Arabic word Jihad is derived from the root word Jahada (struggle). Jihad has come to mean an offensive war to be waged by Muslims against all non-Muslims to convert them to Islam on the pain of death. Jihad is enjoined on all Muslims by the Quran.

...While all forms of religious fanaticism are negative, only Islam raises slaughter of all Kafirs (non-Muslims) to a holy creed, it teaches Muslims to gloat over the killing of non-Muslims and celebrate their death. Hence Islam is the most demented and dangerous form of religious fanaticism. And it is not Islamic fanaticism that is to be blamed for this, as Islam itself is fanaticism.

...The lecherous pedophile prophet of Islam Mohammed-ibn-abdallah had 16 wives. And the Muslim sultans over the ages have stuffed their harems with thousands of wives from the victims of the conquered populations. The sole purpose was to humiliate the defeated enemy, satisfy Muslim lust and procreate endless children who were brought up as Muslims to add to the number of blood-thirsty murderers.

With these baby creating factories not only did the Muslims breed like rats, but they also treated their wives and concubines (Muslim ladies) worse than cattle. Till today, the Muslims look upon a wife as only a devise given by some Allah to beget children, and more the merrier. This why Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world

The lecherous mass-murderer prophet of Islam, has said that no abortion or use of contraceptives is allowed to regulate the growth of population. So the Muslims keep multiplying like mosquitoes and one hundred Muslims turn into one thousand in just one decade. With such monstrous fertility rates, they can inundate any land with their blood-thirsty progeny in no time and then say that the land is a Muslim majority land.

This website dealing with the Crusades and the Reconquista of Spain is historical revisionism and twists facts to suit its agenda. It is also a form of apologetics for Christianity though it goes further. The writers characterize the Crusades and the Inquisition in terms of Christian Triumphalism and idealism and romanticism. Scholars in more recent times have tried to view the Crusades as they really were as opposed to how they have been portrayed in Christian propaganda.But over the past few years there has been an effort to abandon or undermine the attempts by historians to depict the Crusades, the Reconquista and the Inquisition and anti-Semitism in as factual a manner as possible stripped of the Church's propaganda.

Note how the writer speaks about Muslims as the Nazis and Neo-Nazis speak about the Jews. Muslims breed like rats, vermin, mosquitoes and their women are mere baby factories. This is a vile form of racism but goes unnoticed because it is aimed at Muslims and Arabs etc. Most Protestant Fundamentalists and Evangelicals and Roman Catholics are also against birth control or abortion and believe that most women belong at home looking after their children and providing a good home for their husband who is the Master of the household.As for women in West their freedom and liberation did not come easily many had to suffer or even die in order to achieve what they so far have and the Religious Right would take all of those gains away in an instant if they could .

These Christians and Neoconservatives want to rewrite history in order to re-establish the old Christian Myths. By recreating these myths it is believed that the West itself can perceive itself more positively. This is necessary in order to unite the West in its ultimate struggle against the forces of darkness which at the moment are represented in a very real way by the Islamic Terrorists. But in this revisionist view Islam has always been the enemy of Christianity. Islam they claim at its very heart is an enemy of Western Civilization and Christianity.

In this new interpretation of History Jews and Christians have always been united against their common enemy Islam. (Oceania has always been at war with Europa and Christians have always loved and protected the Jews - And Arabs have always been the enemies of science, reason,liberalism,and all things civilized- see Will Durant's Our Oriental Heritage etc. we owe so much in our civilization to the Persians and other Arab and Islamic countries from the sciences and mathematics to philosophy and the arts )

When the first Crusade began in 1097 the Crusaders in their zealousness first massacred tens of thousands of European Jews before heading off to the Holy Land. No longer was anti-Semitism a matter of rhetoric . The Church from its beginnings had preached against the Jews. Now this preaching was to be taken at face value and seriously . If the Jews were as evil as the Church claimed then why not kill as many Jews as possible.

When the Crusaders reached Constantinople and later Jerusalem they could not understand how Christians , Jews and Muslims could in good faith co-exist. Therefore the Crusaders concluded the Christians in these lands were not abiding by the dogmas and doctrines of the Church in Rome . The only way to deal with apostate and heretical Christians was to kill them . Again and again the Crusaders killed not only Muslims but also the Christians and Jews who had lived amongst the Muslims in relative peace for several centuries.Their view was that any true Christian would not have lived passively alongside the hated Muslims. As for the Jews they were the killers of Christ and were the minions of the Anti-Christ and Satan and therefore deserved to be killed. Though the Church claimed that not all Jews were to be killed since a remnant must be left to suffer for their crimes and to be witnesses to the triumph of Christianity.

The other main point of this and other such websites is to prove that Christianity has never committed any great wrongs . The Church is therefore pure from its beginnings to the present and has nothing to apologize for.

For instance in the book God Against the Gods Kirsch argues that in fact from the very beginning Christianity proved itself to be a religion of intolerance and oppression . Once the Christian Church was made the official and only Church of the Roman Empire the Christians began their bloody and brutal and unmerciful war against the Pagans and against all heretics.All Pagan Priests were murdered and all the altars to Pagan Gods were destroyed and Pagans were commanded to convert to Christianity or die . Many Pagans in fact chose martyrdom rather than renounce their beliefs. Of course Christian then as now do not recognize these Pagan Martyrs as true Martyrs. But who is to say that the Pagan martyrs are not the real martyrs and that their religion was the One True Religion.

Anyway the fact is that more Pagans were persecuted and killed by the Christians then Christians were persecuted by the Pagans . And in comparison only a few Christians were in fact killed by the Pagan Romans except for several instances such as Nero scape-goating the Christians for the Burning of Rome .The Pagans themselves preached and practiced at that time in the Roman Empire Religious Tolerance and believed everyone had the right to worship whatever God they wished to. When the Romans fought against the Jews of Judea it was over political questions more than religion this is why not everyone in Judea supported the rebellion by the Jewish Zealots against the Romans. This is not to suggest that the Romans were a pure and virtuous lot. They too took part in massacres and genocide against groups whom they believed to be a threat to the Roman Empire . Emperor Julius Caesar for instance needed a war to increase his reputation and to allow him through plundering to increase his personal wealth so he could increase his political power so he engaged in a trumped up propaganda effort to give him an excuse to attack the Celts in Northern Europe and Britain . During the campaign he massacred over one million Celts and took another million into slavery. So Julius Cesar was a Straussian/ Neoconservative if not one of the first. Fighting a so-called Just War always improves public perception of a leader. And the people in general do love a Just-War since it fills them with pride and patriotic fervor .